


i wanna give her the world

by intertwiningwords



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Canon Compliant, College, F/F, Lesbian!Alana, Pansexual!Zoe, Post-Canon, Roommates, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-06 18:01:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11041380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intertwiningwords/pseuds/intertwiningwords
Summary: zoe goes away to college for a clean slate. she's surprisingly not disappointed when her roommate turns out to be an old friend.





	i wanna give her the world

**Author's Note:**

> bright eyes like wishing wells  
> instamatic kiss and tell  
> optimistic self-belief  
> college girls with perfect teeth

Senior year had been pretty good for Zoe.

  
Despite her lack of friends, she was smart, got fantastic grades, remained in the jazz band, and by the end of her four years in that hell of a school, she had an amazing college resume. Her parents could afford to send her practically anywhere, so she wasn’t worried about that. She would miss her parents, but she wasn’t afraid of being away from home either. She was just excited to go somewhere new, and far from anyone who knew about her brother. She wanted to stop being the dead kid’s sister.  
She chose a college across the coast as her main goal, much to her mother’s disappointment, no matter how much Zoe promised to visit and call and text. But they gave her no protest, so she sent in an application, and was accepted.

  
And so she left, with her hair newly dyed indigo (the whole thing, not just streaks this time), and a silver stud in the side of her nose that nearly gave her mother a heart attack.  
When she got there, she couldn’t help but smile. A huge campus, an active music program, nice dorms. She was content to spend her next few years there.  
She found her room with only a bit of trouble, and let herself in with the key she’d been given upon her arrival. Her roommate had seemingly already moved all of her things in; a bed with blue sheets sat in the left side corner of the room, beside a desk with a laptop and a stack of books, but no person in sight. Perhaps she’d went to say hi to friends, or use the bathroom. Zoe would meet her shortly, she was sure.

  
She began unpacking, placing her guitar in the corner beside her bed, laying out sheets and folding clothes. It was refreshing to be somewhere other than the same bedroom she’d slept in since the day she was brought home from the hospital as a baby. Her parents had never been big on change, but she needed adventure.

  
Zoe’s head perked up at the sound of the doorknob turning. Finally, a chance to meet the person she’d be living with for the year. And just as the girl stepped into the room,

Zoe’s world crashed around her. All she wanted was to go somewhere people didn’t know her.

“Zoe?”

“H-hey, Alana,” she offered her a weak smile. Just be polite, be civil, be friendly. It’s not the end of the world.

“That’s so funny that we got paired together!” Alana said, giving her a bright, beaming smile. “So, how’ve you been?”

“I’ve been alright. You?”

“Amazing!” Alana replied. She hadn’t changed a bit; peppy, excitable, talkative, and full of far too much energy. And still really, really pretty, Zoe noticed. “I’m planning to major in political science,” she continued, Zoe snapped out of her train of thought to at least act like she was listening, “and it’s been a passion of mine since high school so it’s just so awesome to be able to work towards it now! Oh, just warning you, I have a lot of morning classes, so sorry in advance if I wake you up!”

Zoe offered her another smile, more genuine this time. “No problem, I’m a pretty heavy sleeper anyway.”

“Perfect! It’s so nice to be rooming with someone I already kind of know, because last year my roommate was crazy, she would come in at two in the morning, drunk, and usually stringing some boy behind her. With me in the room!”

“Well, don’t worry, I’m not planning on doing much partying or drinking or hooking up while I’m here,” Zoe said.

“Thank God,” Alana said, grinning. “So, uh...how’s your family doing?”

The question she’d been dreading. She wanted to move on. “Good,” she answered honestly. “As fucked up as it sounds, I think my parents needed a tragedy to get their act together. And I think our lives are just...calmer, I guess, without him. I feel bad saying it out loud though,” she admitted with a shrug.

Alana nodded, for once knowing when to keep her mouth shut. “Well, I promised a friend of mine I’d meet her for coffee to celebrate the new semester starting. See you later, Zoe,” she said, turning and grabbing her bag and phone off her bed.

“Bye,” Zoe said, watching her walk through the door and shut it behind her.

Maybe knowing someone at school wasn’t such a bad thing.

 

***

 

Living with Alana was weird at first. They barely saw each other til the evening because of their class schedules, and they were always too tired and swamped with work to talk then.

But the weekends were a different story. They started off awkward, and Zoe mostly spent them alone, as making friends was a lot harder than she’d thought it would be.  
But eventually, Alana started interacting with her, asking her about her week and inviting her out for coffee. They didn’t talk about Connor, or Evan, or anything about high school. They just talked, about books and movies and music and classes and gossip and politics and anything that came to mind.

How they hadn’t been close sooner, Zoe had no idea. Something about them just clicked, and she was beginning to consider her probably the best friend she’d had in awhile.  
Sure, she was over-energetic and occasionally obnoxious, but she was brilliant and bright and so fucking _beautiful_ , Zoe didn’t care.

Yes, Alana was beautiful, and if Zoe hadn’t figured out she was pan a long time ago it would have been a life-altering realization. But it was a slight inconvenience, sharing a living space with a girl you were incredibly attracted to. Especially when you were trying to hide your attraction from said girl for fear of ruining a friendship or freaking her out.  
She hadn’t come to college to date or hookup or anything of the sort. She wanted to study her way through to a degree and then worry about love. But her heart was betraying her every time Alana threw her head back and laughed at something, or started ranting about something she was passionate about and her eyes lit up, or basically every time she walked into a room or breathed.

Alana seemed to remain oblivious though, and Zoe was grateful. But the feelings didn’t go away after the first month, or the second, and when she went home for Thanksgiving, she missed her, and when she got back the little flutter of her heart was still there when Alana excitedly greeted her with a wide smile and a tight hug (she’d stayed home over the holidays because she couldn’t afford the travel).

When she wasn’t drowning in school work, she found herself strumming at her guitar and writing lines to songs she’d probably never finish.  
Some of the songs were happier than others, but many of them revolved around her junior year; the pain, the loss, the lies. But recently, her music had taken on a different theme.

 _She’s got stars in her eyes_  
_Galaxies in her mind_  
_Not like any other girl_  
_I wanna give her the world_

The lyrics were cheesy but it was hard to put her feelings into words most of the time, and even harder when it came to Alana Beck.

“What are you writing?” Alana asked.

Zoe’s head shot up, instinctively shutting her notebook to hide her terrible, extremely gay lyrics. “Oh, um, nothing. Just a song,” she shrugged, trying (and failing) to play it cool.

“What’s it about?”

“My brother,” she blurted out. It wasn’t exactly a lie, she had several of those, mostly uncompleted.

“Oh. If it’s not too, you know, personal, do you think I could...hear it?” Alana asked, sitting at the edge of Zoe’s bed.

Zoe nodded, clearing her throat and flipping through her notebook to a song she’d written just after Connor’s funeral. Evan had been coming around with all those stupid fake emails and trying to make it seem like Connor was this saint, and she’d written it out of pure spite.

She strummed the first few chords before opening her mouth to sing. She’d never sung her own songs for anyone before, but Alana’s eyes were wide with curiosity and she couldn’t say no.

“ _Why should I have a heavy heart? Why should I start to break in pieces? Why should I go and fall apart for you? Cause I cannot play the grieving girl, and lie, saying that I miss you, and that my world has gone dark. I will sing no requiem...tonight_ ,” she sang softly, letting the chords trail off until her fingers stilled, her hands slightly shaky.

When she looked up, Alana was staring at her, which made her blush.

“That was amazing,” Alana said, her voice quiet and sounding genuinely awestruck.

“Thank you! I mean, it’s not finished and it was really more to vent than anything, but I’m, uh, glad you thought so,” she said, rambling a bit. That was the first time someone had complimented her so genuinely like that.

“It was really, really amazing. Thank you for playing it,” Alana said with a smile.

Zoe returned it, hoping the redness in her cheeks wasn’t as obvious as it felt.

 

***

 

Was it creepy for Zoe to say Alana looked pretty while sleeping? Yeah, really creepy, right?

But in the early morning sunlight pouring through their shitty curtains (Zoe hadn’t been able to sleep that night), she looked so peaceful and sweet.

Alana’s alarm went off precisely at seven o’clock, and Zoe pretended to sleep through it as usual as she listened to Alana shuffle around the room.

Zoe couldn’t help but turn over and open her eyes, being met with the sight of Alana’s bare back as she changed, and felt even _more_ creepy, shutting her eyes and willing herself not to open them again until she heard the door open and close, meaning Alana had gone.

She sat up. She needed to take a shower and get coffee, _stat_.

 

***

 

When Zoe came back to the room after her last class of the day and found Alana sitting in a pile of papers, looking on the verge of tears with stress, she took it upon herself to help.

Two cups of tea, an HDMI cable connecting her laptop to the TV, and a change into pajamas later, the two of them were sat on their ugly little futon couch, binge-watching a season of Friends.

“Thank you,” Alana said out of nowhere, having been silent throughout two episodes besides the occasional chuckle, “I’ve been so stressed recently and this is exactly what I needed.”

Zoe smiled at her, putting a hand on her knee. “Of course. Anytime.”

Silence fell between them again. Zoe didn’t move her hand from Alana’s knee, and was met with no protest. They got through half a season before they fell asleep on the couch together.

They woke up in the late afternoon (thank god it was a Friday night they’d chosen to do that), their legs tangled together and the ‘Are you still watching Friends?’ message across the TV.

They’d pulled away from each other, blushing and apologizing.

It was a start in the right direction.

 

***

 

Christmas break came, and Zoe made sure to text Alana every day, using some meme she saw or a school-related question as the excuse.

Alana texted with perfect grammar, but was obsessed with emojis. It was kind of adorable, in Zoe’s opinion.

It was only the second Christmas without Connor, not that he’d been much of a joy during the holidays, but Zoe knew it was still hard for her mother to hang one less stocking.  
So, she tried to be as positive as she could, helping her parents decorate and bake cookies and putting up with annoying Christmas songs, or ‘classics’ as her father called them. It was the closest she’d felt to her parents in a long time.

“Have you made any friends at college?” her mother asked over dinner one night.

Zoe shrugged. “A few. I’m usually too busy with work to hang out with anyone, but there are some kids in my classes I talk to.”

“What about your roommate? Is she nice?"

“Actually, it’s kind of funny. Do you remember Alana? You know, from…” she trailed off, knowing The Connor Project was still a sore subject for everyone.  
Her parents nodded.

“Yeah, she’s my roommate. She’s...she’s really great,” she finished, blushing a little as she said it.

As if she could sense she was being talked about, Alana chose that moment to text her. It was a picture of a cat that looked like it was playing guitar, along with a message that said, “this is you.”

Yeah, Alana was really, _really_  great.

 

***

 

Her return from winter break left with tons of work to catch up on, so she had little time to socialize with anyone, even the person she shared a room with.  
Alana’s nose was always stuck in some textbook, and Zoe was always drowning in projects. Despite that, they’d developed an oddly domestic relationship that didn’t require many words; bringing each other coffee, lending each other a pair of gloves or a scarf before class on a particularly cold day, and other little favors that were simple yet made Zoe incredibly happy.

As the workload decreased however, they fell back into a routine of coffee dates and marathoning TV sitcoms on the weekends.

“Ross is the textbook definition of a fuckboy,” Alana said, practically glaring at the screen. “Like, Rachel could do so much better. Honestly, why didn’t her and Monica just end up together? They’d work so much better.”

Zoe laughed. “I know, right? I think, objectively, women are just better off without men.”

That made Alana laugh, which made Zoe’s heart slam against her ribcage. “True. We should just all be gay.”

“We should!”

Was that, like, a confirmation that she liked girls, or were they just joking? Zoe was thinking into it way too much, but she just needed to know whether or not Alana was gay without making it weird.

“Jennifer Aniston is so beautiful,” she said, hoping for a response to help answer the question.

“She really is. Even as she gets older she still looks good,” Alana replied, before taking a sip of her tea.

Damn.

 

***

 

Dreaming was a curse. You wake up, and nothing you just did really happened, and it takes you a minute to realize it was all just a dream.

Zoe had been waking up almost every day that week thinking she’d kissed Alana Beck.

Lips on lips, skin on skin, shadows of bodies moving together until she woke up sweating.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d crushed this hard on someone, if she ever even had. And her only relationship experience was with Evan, which she preferred to not really think about. Plus, he’d initiated it all, so there were no helpful tips there.

She’d decided to accept her fate and suffer in silence until the feelings faded.

Yeah, right.

 

***

 

They were sitting on that ugly, uncomfortable couch again, but they were watching The Last Song instead of Friends, which they’d finished.

Alana had picked the movie, and it was painfully cheesy and heterosexual for Zoe’s taste, but Alana laughed at all the little jokes, and every on-screen kiss left the two of them leaning closer.

By the end, Alana looked close to tears, and had rested her head on Zoe’s shoulder, and Zoe figured, fuck it.

She moved her hand to Alana’s cheek, softly brushing against her skin, slowly but surely pulling her in for a kiss.

Alana didn’t pull away, and there was no hesitation as she kissed her back, and as cliche as it was, Zoe swore she felt sparks.

They pulled away after a moment, staring at each other for a moment before bursting into laughter, falling into each other and holding each other close.

 

***

 

Alana was nothing like Evan when it came to dating (yes, dating; they’d made it official after a pretty mature discussion about whether they were both ready). She was similar in the way that they were both shy, and gentle, and unsure. But Alana had a fire inside her that Evan just never gave off. Alana was passionate in every conversation they had, and passionate in every kiss and touch.

Evan kissed her like she was the only thing keeping him alive; Alana kissed her like she felt more alive than ever.

“Did you know Star Trek had the first interracial kiss on mainstream television?”

“I didn’t,” Zoe replied, looking from Alana’s face to their interlocked fingers and back. “But that’s so cool! What year was that?”

“1968,”” Alana replied immediately. She had an incredible skill for remembering little facts like that, and Zoe found it very endearing.

Alana’s bed was much more comfortable than the couch, and Zoe’s laptop was big enough to replace the TV for their movie nights. Alana had talked Zoe into watching Star Trek, though Zoe honestly didn’t pay attention to a second of it. How could she, when Alana was sat beside her, skin against skin, the sound of her breathing and the feeling of her heartbeat all filling Zoe’s head and driving her wild.

“And then Jim and- are you listening?”

“What? Sorry, I zoned out,” she replied honestly, giving Alana’s hand a squeeze.

“If I’m boring you I’ll shut up, I just-”

“No, you’re not boring me!” she said instantly. “I like hearing you talk. I just...still can’t believe you’re like, you know...my girlfriend.”

Alana grinned. “You are such a dork.”

“Hey! I’m not a dork,” Zoe pouted.

“You’re a dork, but you’re _my_ dork,” Alana teased, wrapping her arms around her waist and kissing her cheek.

The movie remained pretty much ignored the rest of the night.

 

***

 

Alana loved to touch her, Zoe began to notice. That was normal in a relationship, but Alana just loved to always have their bodies touching somehow. Holding hands, brushing shoulders, kissing, hugging, cuddling, tickle-fights (that Zoe always lost), any form of physical contact Alana could initiate, she did.

Evan had always been shy about touching her, but once Alana knew her boundaries, she did everything within them. And Zoe couldn’t complain.

Alana’s hands were soft, and so were her lips. It made Zoe self-conscious of the calluses on her hands from playing guitar, and the peeling skin on her lips from biting them (a nervous habit she couldn’t seem to shake).

Alana’s hands were tracing shapes onto her thigh, making goosebumps spring up over her bare legs.

Although it was only March, the dorms had started to get hotter, which meant Zoe had opted to not wear pants unless absolutely necessary.

Kissing, and touching, wandering hands, bumping heads, laughing, and more touching, touching, _touching_.

Her and Evan had never done much more than kiss. She probably would have let him if he’d wanted to, and she was glad he never tried. But Alana’s hands and lips were so soft, and the sound of the rain outside and the music streaming from Zoe’s phone (Intertwined by Dodie, for context) just made everything so right.  
It was messy, fumbling, giggling, and fucking perfect. Alana kissed her to keep her quiet, for fear of being heard through the thin walls of the dorm building.  
Zoe never slept better than with Alana’s arms wrapped around her.

 

***

 

When spring break rolled around, Zoe wasted no time in asking Alana to come home with her.

“I want to re-introduce you to my parents. As my girlfriend.”

Alana had said yes surprisingly fast, much to Zoe’s delight, which is how they wound up in the dining room of her parent’s house, an all too familiar setting with a very different connotation.

Her mother adored Alana, and they talked for ages about politics (she’d been a political science major as well) and made sure to throw in embarrassing stories about Zoe throughout.

Her father took it better than she’d thought he would; he wasn’t homophobic, just somewhat uptight and old-fashioned. But he could apparently see how happy she was, and joyfully joined the conversation.

It was probably the happiest Zoe had been in years.

 

***

 

“What are you writing about?” Alana asked, watching Zoe strum at her guitar and hum along to the tune.

“Nothing,” she replied nonchalantly.

Alana raised her eyebrows, but said nothing, returning to her book.

 _She’s got stars in her eyes_  
_Galaxies in her mind_  
_Not like any other girl_  
_I wanna give her the world_  
_She makes me feel alive_  
_For what seems like the first time_  
_She’s got a fire in her heart_  
_And she started the one in mine_  
_She’s not like any other girl_  
_She’s my whole world_

One day, she’d finish it up, change some of the cringey lyrics and clean up the chords. And maybe one day, she’d play it for her.

She put her guitar down and made her way to sit beside Alana, wrapping her arms around her. Her perfume smelled like vanilla, and her skin was soft as ever as Zoe buried her face in the crook of her neck.

Yeah, she was happy. Happier than she’d probably ever been. For now, she didn’t need to say it in a song, or even with words. As she shut her eyes and listened to Alana’s voice, she knew they had really, really something good.

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed!! feedback is always appreciated!! x


End file.
